Interview With Vision Australia

I did an interview with Vision Australia a couple of weeks ago that they have now published online, below. Vision Australia provide audiobooks for blind and vision impaired Australians. The interview touches on class, travel, my feelings about Nordic Noir, the Forsythe trilogy, the Duffy books, more of my crackpot theories, what I've been reading recently, etc.  It's an audio interview only so if you've no patience for that or you've heard me blather about all that shite before dont click the play button. 

The Girl Who Cashed All The Checks

Although it has been heavily embargoed and no preview copies have been sent out I was able to
acquire an early manuscript copy of the controversial new Stieg Larsson novel that his estate has commissioned. I present here the first two pages of The Girl In The Spiders Web. Hopefully the publishers wont make me take this down. I can cheerfully report that although the book was written by a hack Swedish novelist it is up to the high standards of the previous Larsson books. See for yourself:

The Girl In The Spiders Web

Mikael Blomkvist, the ruggedly handsome editor of Millennium magazine woke to the sound of laughter. He opened his eyes and looked around the spare but tastefully decorated bedroom. It was empty. He peered through the window of his apartment on Hantverkargatan Street but no one was on the balcony with an axe or lying flat on his skylight ready to jump through it and murder him. That kind of thing hadn’t happened in months. 
             Not since his last case - a nasty one where a greedy father and brother had ripped off a journalist's widow leaving her with nothing.

            The laughter was coming from the living room. Blomkvist pulled on his Nukes Out T shirt and Cuban Army camo pants and stopped at the mirror on the wall. Yes he still looked ruggedly handsome, he thought and walked into the living room where Helen Hagen was sprawled on the sofa wearing one of his shirts and watching television.

            Hagen was a beautiful 28 year conservative American who had been debating with him the previous evening at a packed event at Stockholm University. The debate had been entitled “American Foreign Policy Is a Force For Good”, she had been for the motion, he had been against. Not only had Blomkvist won the debate, turning the hostile crowd in his favour but he had also won over Hagen and had bedded her after showing her that Noam Chomsky’s denials of the Cambodian genocide were perfectly understandable in the context of the American perfidy and lies that prevailed in the Western media in the post Watergate era.

            He sat down beside her on the sofa.

            “What are you laughing at?” he asked.

            “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s an old episode,” she said in that annoying American twang of hers.

            He watched the show for a few minutes. It was a fake dialectic, the sort of thing Marcuse had predicted in 1968, where the population is offered the illusion of choice and dissent, the better to control them.

            Blomkvist said nothing and went to make some Eritrean Popular Front fair trade coffee.

            “You got a phone call,” Hagen said.

            “From whom? The Zionist capitalists who control the media?!” he asked with alarm.
            “Someone called Lisbeth Salendar. She didn’t leave a message but she sounded like she was in trouble.”

            “I must go!” Blomkvist said pulling on a fair trade sweater, fair trade shoes and a raincoat given him by Olaf Palme for being such a great guy. He ran out of the apartment. 

            It was early morning in Stockholm but already the streets were filled with people: bourgeois businessmen on their way to brothels filled with underage trafficked Russian girls, fat American tourists with their noses stuffed in McDonalds wrappers, complacent young people with their faces in iPhones built by slave labour in far off China.

            When he arrived at Salendar’s apartment she had already left but Salander’s girlfriend, a cool punk rock singer called Bug was waiting for him. Bug was a musician and in the public eye a lot but she was a positive role model for young women, rejecting the patriarchy, the capitalist record companies and the corporate shills. She was a confirmed lesbian with a mohawk and a completely appropriate body fat ratio for her height. In fact she may even have been a little overweight. Not that being underweight or overweight would have mattered to her because she was confident in who she was and unconcerned by contingent western standards of beauty. That’s how cool she was. Yes, a little bit overweight, Blomkvist decided, damning his eyes for objectifying the young woman. Plump even. Ok chubby. But in a good way.

            “Lisbeth isn’t here,” Bug said.

            “I like big butts and I cannot lie,” Blomkvist said.

            Bug stared at him.

            “I, I, don’t know why I said that,” Blomkvist stuttered, horrified.

            “Was that Sir Mixalot?” Bug asked.

“I don’t know. I appreciate the culture of African American musical artists but at the same time I loathe the sexism of much of the hip hop community.”

            Bug looked him up and down. “Well aren’t you a tall drink of water,” she said admiringly.

            “What trouble is Lisbeth in this time?” Blomkvist asked quickly. He knew he was irresistible but he just didn’t have the time or energy to convert yet another lesbian thirty years his junior.  

            “Lisbeth made a surveillance tape of a man who tortures women,” Bug said.

            “All men torture women,” Blomkvist said solemnly.

            “Don’t go all Andrea Dworkin on me,” Bug said. “Just stay focused and watch the tape.”

            Blomkvist and Bug watched the tape. The violence inflicted on the women was shocking. Blomkvist called up the owner of Millennium magazine.

            “A famous rich Swedish industrialist has been kidnapping and torturing young women,” he said.

            “Who is this? What time is it?” a sleepy voice replied.

“Let me take twenty minutes out of your morning to explain exactly how these young women were violated and tortured in graphic, lurid detail,” Blomkvist said.

“Wait, who is this?”

“First he would tie them up, then—"
      "I think you have the wrong number, I'm not--
      "Then he would bring out the chains and dildoes."
      "I'm hanging up, weirdo."
      Click. Dialtone. "My God. They are already closing in," Blomkvist said his eyes wide with terror.

Are There Working Class Voices In The Booker Prize Long List?

Not posh enough for the Booker?

This is a genuine question. I've only read 2 books on the longlist this year (which, as usual, is pretty diverse in terms of representation of people of colour and women) so I don't actually know if they've got some working class writers on there. I'm suspicious of them because in the past the Booker Prize has ignored working class writers, especially working class women like Zadie Smith or Monica Ali or Janette Winterson, and every year they pick a very posh person (private school, Oxbridge) to be the chairman (its almost always a man) of the judging panel. Most of the other judges are also very posh which perhaps is why the Booker Prize longlist is always strangely bereft of anyone from a working class background. But, like I say, I don't know maybe this year it's different. I've done a cursory look through the author bios on the Booker website and I see literary agents, journalists, graduates of prestigious MFA programmes etc, not many brickies or mums in South London flats. The subject matter of these books too (apart from the always interesting Commonwealth writers) seems to be about upper middle class people and their bloody problems. I reckon even last year's winner, Richard Flannagan, a blue collar kid from hardscrabble rural Tazzie probably wouldn't have won if he had written a book about enlisted men instead the officer class in the British army...Julian Barnes called the Booker Prize "posh bingo" and he wd know, wouldn't he? (The other big Aussie winner over the years has been Peter Carey who is very posh indeed.) 
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Maybe I'm wrong, maybe times have changed and there are many books about working class people on there...If you've read more than I have (and you probably have) please let me know and I will - happily - stand corrected.

A Visit To The Bronte Parsonage

Last month when I was in Harrogate I had a free chunk of time before getting my plane to Belfast. Because of jet-lag I was a awake at 4.00 am wondering what I could do in Yorkshire before my 2.00 pm flight from Leeds-Bradford. A bit of googling convinced me that I could pay a visit to the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth and still make my flight. Ergo: walk to Harrogate train station, train to Leeds, train to Keighley, bus to Haworth, walk up a very steep hill (with my dodgy knees) to the Bronte house. 
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The parsonage is now a museum with a lot of Bronte memorabilia, replica desks and beds and furnishings. Most of the writing seems to have been done in the tiny front parlour where Anne, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell made up stories, did drawings and talked. It's an incredible sensation to be in that room where so much talent and creativity flowed. The museum has acquired both Emily's and Charlotte's portable writing desks (that one puts on ones lap or a table) and these are on display too. 
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Haworth itself is a windy, hilly out of the way place. When I arrived at Keighley train station the temperature was 5 degrees Celsius and this was in high summer, so I imagine that in winter it gets pretty wet, cold and damp in those parts. The house where the Brontes lived looks like it was pretty cold too with thin walls, thin windows, an exposed location at the top of a hill and only smoky coal fires to heat it. It's no wonder, really, that TB in the pre-antibiotic age almost wiped out the entire family. 
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The Bronte sisters tried various boarding schools but were always unhappy there and were mostly educated at home by their Ulsterman father Patrick. I asked someone at the Parsonage if the girls spoke with an Ulster accent or a Yorkshire accent (the accent in Keighley and Haworth is particularly strong) but they didn't know. Later I found this fascinating paragraph from Mick Armitage's website about Anne Bronte.

The only reference to any verbal accent the Brontës exhibited was by Mary Taylor, another one of Charlotte's life-long friends, who declared that, when they first met at Roe Head School in 1831, Charlotte 'spoke with a strong Irish accent'.  This accent was obviously acquired from her father, Patrick, who was of Irish descent. It seems logical to assume that Charlotte's accent would be echoed in Anne, and indeed her other siblings. However, as there are no other references whatever to their accent, it may not have been as 'strong', or 'obvious', as Mary Taylor suggests; alternatively, the Brontë children may have lost most of this accent during their youth. This is possible as Patrick is noted to have lost all his by 1853. Given that the siblings spent much of their childhood and youth under the care of Aunt Branwell, who was from Cornwall, it seems certain that they would have acquired some of her Cornish accent, not to mention the inevitability of adopting some of the local Yorkshire dialect from their servants and local acquaintances. In conclusion, their accent was probably a blend of all three - and one can only wonder what this sounded like.

Ned Kelly Award 2015

I am very excited to announce here on the blog that my novel Gun Street Girl has been short-listed for the 2015 Ned Kelly Award. In the judges opinion this was the "best Duffy yet" which pleased me no end as I thought very seriously about ending the series after book 3. 
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You can read the complete list of six shortlisted novels at the Australian Crime Writers Association website. I've read two of the other books on the list Malla Nunn's Present Darkness and Barry Maitland's Crucifixion Creek and they were both excellent!
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This is the third year in a row that my new Sean Duffy novel has been shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. If you haven't read any of them maybe this wd be a good time to start?

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

Rachel lost her job because she's a lush and she got drunk and embarrassed herself in front of one of her firm's clients. Like Michael Douglas in the 90's classic Falling Down she still pretends to go to work every day on the train because she can't think of what else to do. She commutes to London every morning on the 8.04 from a suburban town drinking wine from a paper cup. When she gets to London she's toasted and she spends the day in libraries or parks, sleeping and drinking before getting the train home again. She's the despair of her flatmate Cathy who wishes she would get her act together. Riding the train every morning Rachel imagines the lives of the families she sees whose houses back onto the track. One beautiful couple, Scott and Meghan particularly intrigue her, but then Meghan goes missing....
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The Girl on the Train has been a runaway, er, locomotive of a success. I can see why. It's got a taut little mystery and its a psychological thriller with an untrustworthy narrator and a nice shift of perspective to other female protagonists: the missing woman Meghan and Rachel's exhusband's new wife Anna. Along the way we find out why Rachel started drinking in the first place (she couldn't get pregnant and her marriage collapsed) and I liked the idea that the story is told through the perspectives of three women none of whom we can completely believe (I love unreliable narrators) and none of whom have the whole truth. 
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What I don't like about TGOTT is that the entire book turns on two tropes that I am very leery about: amnesia and coincidence. Amnesia and coincidence are so played out as concepts that I never recommend them when I'm teaching at a workshop or talking to students. Coincidence that turns a wheel of the plot in a crime novel makes my head physically hurt and amnesia seems best suited to soap operas. As The Girl On The Train's sales reach the 3 million mark this - again - is why you should never listen to me for writerly advice. 

Slow West

The kind of westerns I liked as a kid and young adult might broadly be called "alternative Westerns" or maybe even "anti westerns" because they were pretty far removed from the John Ford/Howard Hawks cowboys versus Indians type of thing. Sergio Leone's westerns were written by an Italian, scored by an Italian (the scores were very important) and filmed in southern Spain. I've heard people rail against Leone's work saying that they're not proper westerns but that was fine with me. Stylish, weird, with odd dubbing and good music Leone made me interested in the genre for the first time. Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks and Little Big Man also cd be considered alternative westerns. And lets not forget Sam Peckinpah's masterpieces: Pat Garrett and Billy The Kidd & The Wild Bunch. The great David Peoples' script for Unforgiven also has a certain left field quality to it. 
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But really it was Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man starring Johnny Depp that got the whole ball rolling in this genre. Existential, slow, strange and fascinating Dead Man is a movie you either love or are bored out of our mind by. Kelly Reichardt's terrific, slow, existential feminist western Meek's Cutoff also ploughs this Jarmuschian furrow. As do the Coens in their version of True Grit.
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Slow West then is working in an established genre with a lot of heavy lifting to do to make it unique and interesting. It tells the story of, Jay, a young Scottish aristocrat (this important class dimension might be missed by some viewers) played by Kodi Smit-McPhee who is looking for his girlfriend in Colorado. She fled Scotland along with her father following a tragic incident that is told in flashback. Along the way Jay meets Michael Fassebender and they have the sort of incidents with the sort of oddballs you expect in an alternative western. I know this doesn't sound promising but somehow the whole thing works brilliantly. The movie is being deliberately provocative by calling itself Slow West - it isn't slow at all, its twisty and gripping and good. Bounty hunters are also after Jay's girl - Caren Pistorius - who looks like a young Jennifer Connolly and who was an absolute revelation in this part. Filmed in an only slightly annoying Jacksonian New Zealand (twenty minutes west of Christchurch by the looks of it), the first time director John Maclean does a terrific job making all the characters in the movie interesting. John McClane may have saved Nakatomi Plaza but John Maclean as well as being the keyboard player in the Beta Band (who I saw support Radiohead at Red Rocks) has a great career ahead of him as a director. The score's pretty interesting too.